Our service outage on Friday.

[#1]

As you will be aware we had a full service outage on Friday.  This was due to a major water leak at one of our third party suppliers which knocked out both our primary and backup systems. The outage began at 10.10am and lasted until just after 6pm, when calls, texts and data were working again.

During the outage we worked with our supplier to fix the problem as quickly as possible and made it our priority ensure that all our members were kept up to date with the latest developments.  We are extremely upset to have this happen to our members and are committed to doing our utmost to prevent issues like this from happening again.

I’m pleased to report that things ran smoothly over the weekend and we used the time to fully repair everything and tidy up individual problems caused by the outage. For the more technically minded, Nigel, our CTO , has started a thread in the community which will go into the detail of the outage and what we have done, and will be doing to prevent it’s recurrence.

This year, as we grow as a company, we are committed to making substantial investments in our infrastructure. Due to Friday’s outage we will be reviewing these plans with the intent of bringing forward investment in capacity and resiliency. I’d also like to assure you of our commitment to making the giffgaff experience as good as possible.

It has been amazing to see the messages of support and the suggestions that we should make a charitable donation as a way of making up for Friday’s outage.  We therefore intend to make a £10,000 donation to a charity of your choice.  The charities are ones you nominated for Payback in December  -  to vote just use the polling buttons on the main blog page before the end of the week.  

[#2]

People do make me laugh.. £10,000 is a lot of money and the charities could put it to good use... On a £10 goody bag you would of lost out on 30p... couldnt even buy you a bag of crisps or a few text messages on another network. Is it really worth all the moaning...

[#3]

Ok, it was annoying having no service.

 If my phone had broke, I would have had to sort something else out until it was working again. 

I was able to access the updates and was grateful for that at the time.

I will continue to use giff gaff as long as the service is stable and happy a charity have benefited so much.

Its nice to be able to have a voice.

[#4]

Yup, wot lindsey_s said

11p, ladies and gents. 

11p.

[#5]

I got my girlfriend a GiffGaff sim, was planning on switching to GiffGaff myself when my contract ended, but this incident has shown how GiffGaff can be so much cheaper than the proper networks.

[#6]

Well I say to all u that would rather have the cash than give it to charity sham on you !! You can't be that skint to need some cash back for what happend on Friday yes it was doing my head in aswell but come on its not the end of the world isit ??? Sort your selfs out and don't be greedy :@()

[#7]

Im happy with the fact your donating to charity other networks u wouldn't even get an apology so ty gg which ever charity is choosen will be gratefully. Any cancer charity I would be happy with. Tracy

[#8]

Well done gg it was only for half a day. Things like this happen and which ever Charity gets the doe I hope it helps them. How much doe could you give back to the members £1 ?? Or 2. I say lets give Charity a chance.

[#9]

Althought i have no objection to given to charity. Some customers will be a lot more out of pocket than others. I think the idea of giving a day extention to goody bags is great. another alternative may be a Hokey Cokey day for all customers or 100 points and let the customer decide what to do with em. 

[#10]

Well said ..There's no price on losing a necessary service.

[#11]

Any chance that Giffgaff can explain the rationale for choosing to donate to charity rather than compensate customers?  Is it too expensive, too complex etc?  Is it cheaper to donate £10,000 than give X customers 1 days goodybag at 33p?

I'd also like some more information about these charities before deciding who to vote for.  Aside from Macmillan I don't know anything about the others, and as someone has already mentioned, I didn't think there was a national Air Ambulance service, and they were all regionalised - so where does it go? 

I think Giffgaff have underestimated how much the outage inconvenienced their customers